Don't worry, Bulls prepared to pay up to keep Jimmy Butler

Jimmy Butler bet on himself and next summer Bulls prepared to pay up to keep All-Star guard

Before his team blasted the Bulls 97-77 at the United Center, Jazz coach Quin Snyder sounded like someone choosing between shoveling and snow-blowing his driveway Wednesday when describing what concerned him most.

As the NBA nears midseason, you can find Butler in conversations about the league's most valuable player, most improved player and defensive player of the year. You can find Butler hitting clutch shots and willing himself to the free-throw line, even if Wednesday's rare clunker when the Bulls were colder than your mail carrier wasn't one of those games. You usually can find Butler shutting down elite scorers, his primary role before stardom arrived.

You will find Butler in a Bulls uniform for years to come.

Now is as good a time as any to reinforce that, before next month's All-Star Game gives national media a chance to create a narrative that Butler's restricted free-agency next summer opens the possibility of him leaving Chicago. Before we hear again all about how the Bulls low-balled Butler in preseason by offering a multiyear deal averaging $11 million, a reasonable number given Butler's career to that point. Before any local debate begins whether Butler is worth the max contract coming his way.

Just watch the Bulls. There is no debate. In the NBA marketplace, Butler most certainly is.

Butler did what every great young athlete dreams of doing; he bet on himself and won big. Nobody can foresee injuries but Butler already has proved he was worth every penny he wanted during negotiations. If Butler hits his 21.9 average over the next nine games, he will exceed his 2013-14 season point total of 878 points with half the season left. That's not a season-to-season improvement. That's a career metamorphosis.

That experience has come in the form of Gasol's stellar play on the court and with his savvy off it. Perhaps that never was more evident than when Gasol put the Grant Park rally plans on pause after Tuesday's...

That experience has come in the form of Gasol's stellar play on the court and with his savvy off it. Perhaps that never was more evident than when Gasol put the Grant Park rally plans on pause after Tuesday's...

(K.C. Johnson)

No player means any more to his team at both ends of the floor than Butler does to the Bulls, who stand ready to show how much they believe that. Internally, the Bulls are planning to take a proactive approach to contract negotiations with Butler next July and secure the shooting guard for a long-term spot alongside Derrick Rose.

They began preparing for that inevitability one year ago this week when they reset the clock on the NBA's repeater tax — which penalizes teams that pay the luxury tax three of four seasons — by trading Luol Deng to the Cavaliers. They fully expect to sign Butler to a max deal next July before another team even gets involved to tempt him with an offer sheet, which the CBA says they can after the moratorium ends. They accept that the size of Butler's contract will put the Bulls in position to pay the luxury tax, something Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf says he will do for a championship contender his team is.

What size will that contract be? The player Butler stepped in front of Wednesday night for a steal that preceded a two-handed slam, Jazz forward Gordon Hayward, provided a clue. Hayward should have bowed to the Michael Jordan statue outside Gate 4 on his way into the building. It was Jordan, in his role as owner of the Hornets, who stunned the league, including Hayward, by signing him to a four-year, $63 million offer sheet last July. The Jazz matched, guaranteeing the guy who averaged 16.2 points per game last season a $15.75 million salary.

That's the neighborhood in which Butler will live, contractually, heading into next season barring a major injury or change of heart nobody expects. Remember, at the end of negotiations last fall some described as contentious, Butler reaffirmed his desire to stay on a team he realizes ideally suits his skill set.

"People say I'm chasing money when that's not it,'' Butler said hours after the Nov. 1 deadline for contract extension expired. "I'm going to be in Chicago. I say that with a smile on my face because I know that for a fact.''

Butler's smile only has widened as he has evolved from a shooting guard who struggled to shoot straight into a go-to scorer and the Bulls have emerged as one of the NBA's most complete teams, the Jazz loss notwithstanding. The ageless Gasol appears reinvigorated as a fluid offensive threat and surprising, rim-protecting defensive presence. The young import, Nikola Mirotic and his fabulous beard, looks like an NBA veteran the way he craves big moments. Rose is healthy and Joakim Noah, though needed less, never has meant more.

But without Butler developing into the All-Star perimeter threat the Bulls thought they lacked, nobody in town already would be thinking ahead to next summer.